Friday, 28 September 2012

So as I said in Part 1 of the Angola story, the whole reason we were out in Angola was to download this year's set of data from the DELOS observatory platforms. Of course, it didn't all go quite as we'd planned!

We arrived in the Luanda, Angola's capital city early on a Saturday morning in the middle of August which coincidentally turned out to be right before their four-yearly election governmental elections which in turn meant that we were instantly put on curfew by BP as soon as we left the hotel due to a planned public demonstration that same day! Still, after an eight-hour overnight flight I can't say I was too upset at getting some time to relax in a hotel room.

In the end it turned out that the demonstration never happened, but with the imminent elections and all the preparations taking place, we were delayed onshore for an extra week because the government commandeered all available helicopters and fast boats to move election officials around the country and we needed a helicopter transfer to take us to the ship where we'd be doing our servicing work. For the most part we had to stay in the hotel, but we did get out a few times to see a bit of city and visit various colleagues working in the labs and on the industry side of things which was a great benefit of being onshore for a little bit longer. Oh - and we also got to see humpback whales breaching just offshore while we were having lunch in a cafe by the beach!

A man-made beach in Luanda

Luanda was certainly a strange place to be and a difficult place to get to grips with, probably largely because we weren't really able to get out and wander around the city and most of what we got to see was either from the hotel or from inside taxies. Mostly, it felt like a country of extreme contrasts. Parts of Luanda were obviously enormously affluent, with 4- and 5-star hotels and new apartment buildings being built all along the waterfront, as well as a new parliament building and a new 'Copacabana'-styled strip along the coast in the centre of the city.

There is a huge amount of investment in construction going on at the moment throughout Angola.

But surrounding everything were shanty towns with limited electricity, poor sanitation and absolutely no facility for disposing of any of the waste generated by so many people. A quick read through the BBC's webpage suggests that the majority of Angolans live on less than $2US per day, and while that figure may be an underestimate now, it's clear that most people are nonetheless very poor. It contrasts so sharply with the obvious wealth of the few that it's pretty disconcerting.

These boys earned their money shining shoes in the centre of Luanda.

Our hotel overlooked a litter-strewn bay and shanty town.

After a few days in the city, once the elections were over we managed to hire a car to take us down the coast a bit to a tourist lodge at the River Kwanzaa, about an hour or so south of Luanda for my first trip out into the country.

Not sure if these are baobab trees or something else, but they were a common sight in the scrub land as we drove down to the coast.

Heading down towards the Kwanzaa river, the habitat began to change more and more to forest.

The road down to Kwanzaa lodge

The view across the river

The scenery was pretty stunning as we drove down the coast, though the car wrecks which appeared every few hundred metres weren't totally reassuring! The region seemed to be mostly scrubland, but moving down towards the river we got into more and more forest and started to see a bit more wildlife which was very cool. No big game animals right enough, but plenty of birds and once we got to the Kwanzaa lodge there were also crabs everywhere which was pretty awesome (if you're a big marine biology nerd like me!)!

Ghost crab

Fiddler crabs displaying their oh-so-manly claws

A shore crab hiding in stranded water hyacyinth

Large rafts of water hyacinth washed up along the coast here

An effort had obviously been made made to keep the beaches tidy, but with nowhere to put the rubbish it just ended up in piles along the shore.

Cows on the road

Finally though, after an extra week onshore and one final extra day spent trying to convince the immigration guys at the airport that our (definitely valid) offshore visas were not expired and were in fact totally fine, we finally made it onto the helicopter and off to the Ocean Interceptor III where we would be working with an offshore ROV inspection team and collecting my data!

Tuesday, 18 September 2012

So, after three weeks away to the west coast of Africa, I'm back to tell the tale! But before I launch into everything that we did out there, I'd better give you a bit of background on why we went.

Part of my PhD work is looking at the effects of deep-water oil production on the behaviour and composition of fish communities over time. While shalllow-water effects have now been studied in depth for a number of years, there is virtually no data available on the effects that oil production in the deep sea (>1000m) may have on the benthic (seabed) fauna, particularly on mobile species such as fish.

In shallow waters, oil rigs are known to provide artificial habitat for a variety of fish species, and the abundance of fish at such oil platforms can be far higher than in the surrounding waters. This knowledge has led to programmes such as 'Rigs-to-Reefs' in the US which convert decommissioned oil platforms into man-made reefs to provide artificial habitat for fish and invertebrates as well as protection from fishing activities such as trawling. Many shallow-water fish species are attracted to vertical structures and will use such open, complex structures to hide from predators or as feeding grounds once the reefs become colonised by invertebrate life. Even while they are operational, static platforms still provide hard substrate for invertebrates to live on and for mobile animals to live in and around.

However, the role of oil platforms in the deep-sea and their potential for providing artificial reef habitats are as yet unknown. While we might expect the effects to be similar in deep water as they are in shallow water we need to consider a couple of important differences in the behaviour of the fish themselves and the type of oil production structures present.

In the deep-sea, there is relatively little hard substrate; the majority of the seabed is comprised of soft sediments like muds and clays, and is typically rather featureless, particularly in the areas targeted for deep-water oil production fields. Consequently, we could expect the fish species that live in these areas to have relatively low affinity for hard substrates since natural reef structures are rare, and therefore that the presence of any reef structure would have relatively little effect on aggregating those species without some other attraction (e.g. a good food source).

Secondly, oil production structures in deep water are physically very different to those in shallow waters, and tend to be far more spread out over the seabed. The oil wells themselves are capped by wellheads which are a few metres in diameter, and which connect via pipelines to a central 'hub' which in turn connects a flexible pipeline to a floating surface production vessel. This means that the actual amount of 'reef space' provided by the structures is relatively low compared to shallow, static rigs and it is therefore unclear how much of an effect this might have on local fish populations.

An example of a deep-sea oil field with surface production vessels.
Image credit: http://angolarising.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/big-oil.html

This is where I come in. As a part of my PhD, I'm using data collected by two seafloor observatory platforms situated off the west coast of Angola in 1400m of seawater and installed by BP through the DELOS project. One of the platforms sits around 50m from an active oil well (the 'Near Field' platform) while the other is located approximately 15km away from any production activity (the 'Far Field' platform) and acts as a control site. The platforms each contain a number of 'modules' which hold time-lapse cameras, environmental sensors, active and passive sonar sensors and a sediment trap at the far-field and we can use these to investigate how the environment varies naturally over time at each site and whether we can see any effects of either the oil production structures or natural environmental change on the fish communities present.

We've been collecting data from these observatories since February 2009, and although there were some early teething problems which needed to be resolved, we've now got a very nice dataset covering three years from an area of the world about which very little is known about the marine environment at all, never mind the deep sea! However, while the platforms are designed to operate autonomously for the most part, they do need to be serviced each year for routine maintenance (swapping batteries etc.) and to download the data that's been collected over the previous 12 months. This all means that once a year, technicians from Oceanlab (University of Aberdeen) have to head south to the Angolan capital city of Luanda, and then offshore via helicopter to the ROV servicing vessel, work around the clock to get everything done in as short a time as possible, reinstall the modules into the observatories and head back home again with all the data.

Sounds pretty straightforward doesn't it?

Well, this year I was finally able to join the technical team and head down there myself to see the equipment that's been feeding me data for the last two years and learn how it all gets done! It wasn't quite as smooth sailing as we'd anticipated though...

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About Me

I'm a marine biologist who gets to do some incredibly cool things and call it work! I finished my PhD at Glasgow University in 2016, and now I'm in South Florida working on understanding how humans and the natural environment influence changes in deep-sea fish communities. When I'm not working, I'm usually out photographing wildlife, either out on the coast or SCUBA diving.